Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 13 - Hard Truth

by Hard Truth(lit)

  "What happened?"

  "Come down."

  Rita's face was withdrawn and Anna was overcome with a sense of deja vu, of watching Robert Proffit vanish, and had to clench her teeth to keep from crying out, "Don't go!"

  This time she was not to be abandoned. In less than five minutes-an exceedingly long five minutes-she heard the reassuring sounds of Rita making her way into the gorge from down the trail where seasonal runoff had carved a rough-and-tumble stairway of stone.

  Rita was strong and she was creative. Having shored up both sides of Anna's feet and ankles with rocks of various sizes so, should the boulder roll in the wrong direction, they would not be crushed, she found two sturdy limbs and put one beneath the boulder on either side of Anna's knees. On a three count, they pried, Rita providing most of the muscle, Anna doing what she could from her awkward position to steer the boul-der along the line of least collateral damage.

  The plan was a complete success. Within half an hour of Rita's arrival, Anna was free. Walking was out of the question till she got the kinks worked out and the blood flowing. Because she had shared those moments of terror with Heath Jarrod-or at least the Heath Jarrod of her imagin-ing-Anna was grateful for the shooting pains, the tingles that verged on manic itches, all the slings and arrows of sensation letting her know she would walk home in the near future.

  As she kneaded and stretched she told Rita the story of how she'd come to be found under a rock in Tourmaline Gorge. Anna had expected the satisfaction of her subordinate's righteous anger and edgy mystifica-tion at the relating of the bleeding backpack. She was disappointed. Rita let that-which Anna had considered the stellar component in the drama-pass over her as if itinerant youth ministers toting gore in the backcountry of Rocky were an everyday occurrence. The bit she reacted to with satisfying outrage was that Robert Proffit had called down to her. then left without offering aid. For a stumbling minute or two-time dur-ing which Anna remembered Rita and Proffit in the emergency room praying together like old seminary buddies-Rita tried to find excuses for Robert's abandonment of a person in need. Evidently it was hard to accept that he was a rotten Samaritan.

  Anna had told her story in repayment for Rita's rescuing her from what was beginning to look like a cold, thirsty, ignoble death. That done, she asked the question that had been nagging her since she'd been able to think of anything more complex than crawling out from under her rock.

  "How did you know I was here?"

  Rita was probably not much good at lying because Anna could see the temptation to do it clearly on her face in the seconds before she answered.

  "Robert told me," she said with reluctance.

  "You've seen Robert?"

  "He left me a note," Rita amended. "I found it when I came home for lunch."

  Anna noted that she'd not answered precisely. She decided to let it pass. For now.

  'A note."

  "It said, 'I can't do this anymore. I have to go. Tell Ranger Pigeon it was an accident.'"

  "That's all?"

  "Yes. Just that."

  Anna digested this information for a brief moment, then again she asked, "How did you know I was here?"

  Rita opened her mouth once or twice in the time-honored tradition of goldfish. After these false starts she said, "I didn't know you were here exactly. I just knew where he was hiking yesterday."

  Anna waited but Rita seemed to think she'd said enough. She stood, began gathering up her daypack as if a decision had been made to decamp.

  "Sit down," Anna ordered.

  "It'll be dark soon," Rita said. "We should head down."

  It wasn't yet three o'clock and they weren't more than two and a half hours from the Bear Lake parking lot. Anna said nothing. After a bit of shuffling, Rita took off her pack and sat down as she'd been bidden.

  Anna eased herself up gingerly with the help of one of the many boulders so she could practice standing while she grilled Rita.

  "This hasn't been a particularly good day for me," she said after the first wave of pain and dizziness broke and began to recede. "What with one thing and another I've pretty much run out of patience. Suffice to say I'm in a real bad mood. You rescued me. I'm grateful. But if you keep jerk-ing me around with these bullshit half-answers, that gratitude could turn to pure meanness. Let's try this again."

  Rita sat quietly through this tongue-lashing, but not docilely. Her spine straightened, her broad shoulders squared, her handsome face settled into a stoic mask. Watching this subtle transformation, Anna realized she'd not triggered sullenness, guilt, defensiveness, slyness or any of the many things she'd expected, given Rita's evasiveness. What she was seeing was the determined courage of the martyr waiting to die for the cause.

  "Jesus," Anna sighed.

  "Amen."

  "Fuck," Anna fumed, inadvertently hitting on an expletive that Rita didn't feel the need to ratify with the god of her understanding. Using the rock for support, Anna began rotating her left foot. The movement sent shivers of a nauseating mix of sensations through her bones. "You get a note from Proffit saying to tell me 'it was an accident.' Rather than figur-ing he scratched my car or mowed down my lilac bush you immediately figure he's shoved me off an isolated rock on the less traveled side of Tourmaline Gorge. Tell me exactly how that worked."

  Rita thought for a moment. The woman was around thirty years old, educated and smart. As a law enforcement ranger and paramedic at Rocky for seven seasons, she would have seen the darker, stupider, bloodier, more spiteful side of her fellow men and women. Despite that, she seemed to have retained an innocence-or naivete-that rendered dissembling im-possible. Her face was as easy to read as a child's.

  Running under the smooth tanned skin like fishes beneath clear water, answers were trotted out, examined and then discarded. Finally Rita settled on one she liked.

  "I knew Robert was up this way yesterday. I happened to be coming up here today anyway. The note hadn't made me think you were in trouble but it bothered me so I was kind of keeping my eyes and ears open more than usual. I heard somebody shouting and saw a daypack sitting on Pic-nic Rock-I knew you'd probably stop here because we'd talked about it. I looked over and there you were." To Anna's surprise Rita then smiled at her. It wasn't mockery or idiocy, it was pride. She was proud of herself for having managed her story so neatly, Anna suspected.

  "Why was Robert hiking up this way?"

  "He could have been looking for Candace."

  "Why do you suppose his pack was hemorrhaging?"

  "I suppose it could have been something else. A broken wine bottle, catsup, whatever."

  "Why were you hiking up the gorge today? It's your day off. I'd think you'd want a change of pace."

  "I hike up here a lot."

  Anna had been asking the questions rapid-fire. Now she stopped. The pattern she'd been searching for-in lieu of any useful information apparently-had emerged. Rita wasn't going to lie to her, at least not yet, not over this adventure. People would often say, "I don't want to lie to you..." Which usually meant not only did they want to lie but, as her neighbors in Mississippi would say, were fixin' to do just that. Rita, on the other hand, was jumping through semantic hoops to avoid an untruth. Maybe she was afraid lying would get her sent to hell come the final reckoning.

  Not telling the whole truth could get her there a whole lot sooner than that if Anna had any say in the matter.

  "I think I'm good to go," Anna said.

  "Out to Bear?" Rita asked as she let Anna set the pace on the scramble. ut of the gorge.

  "Down to Fern. I've a couple questions for Ray." As soon as Anna had been freed, she'd retrieved her radio. In the twenty-four hours she'd lain n her prickly bed of manzanita, feet firmly clamped in a pair of Mother Nature's many jaws, there'd not been a single burble from anybody won-dering where she was.

  After the incarceration of the night, movement was not merely good for

  muscle, nerve and bone, it was a salve to Anna's spirit. Rita gave her water and grano
la bars, and by the time they came out at Odessa Lake and joined the main trail to Fern, Anna was feeling almost as good as new. An underlying ache in her back and a pit of fatigue beneath her frontal lobe let her know this bliss was to be short-lived and she made a point to enjoy every moment, every step of it.

  She intentionally maintained radio silence. The only people that knew

  -he had been out of commission for the past day were Robert Proffit, Rita Perry and Raymond Bleeker. He'd never kept their appointment. Anna

  wanted to know why. She wanted to see his face when she walked into the cabin unannounced. Even the most practiced deceivers, if caught off guard, tended to give themselves away. Maybe only for a fraction of a second, but Anna would be watching for it.

  The trail curled down around Fern to a wooden footbridge that crossed over the stream fed by the tiny lake. Fern's waters, cupped in a bowl of lodgepole pine, showed emerald green even under partly clouded skies. Over the lip of the outlet where the creek ran shallow, it was crystal clear. Cut-throat trout sometimes came to sun themselves under the bridge, their blood-red throats and speckled backs enlivening an always sparkling scene.

  Anna noted it only peripherally. She walked ahead of Rita, concentrat-ing on the bits of humanity scattered around the lake. Two boys haunted the footbridge, undoubtedly annoying the fish. A woman, trousers shoved up to let the sun warm her shins, leaned against the bole of a tree near the water reading her book. Two old people, white hair glowing from beneath the rumpled brims of cloth hats, fished from the downed logs in the water in front of the cabin. Of Ray Bleeker there was no sign. She was glad of it. It was her hope to be ensconced in his cabin when he got home, all the better for her experiment in shock.

  Rita fell back, talking to somebody. Anna barely registered the defec-tion. Rangers had a hard time getting from point A to point B without getting stopped half a dozen times by visitors with questions or stones. People like to talk to rangers. Even rangers with guns. Rangers were differ-ent from policemen-assumed to be good, nonviolent, understanding, lenient and basically on your side. Mostly that was true. Anna hoped it would never change.

  Except that Rita was on her day off, out of uniform. Anna stopped.

  "Hey, Anna." The words came at her from behind. She jerked around to see Raymond Bleeker smiling at her, Rita behind his shoulder. So much for surprise.

  "What are you doing here?" she snapped.

  Ray, who'd been smiling in apparently genuine pleasure at seeing her, recoiled as if she'd spit at him. "Here? Fern Lake?"

  "No. Here." Anna stamped her foot to indicate this chunk of trail.

  For an instant he seemed alarmed. Or maybe just annoyed. "I was checking the group sites." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward where large groups were sequestered lest their noise or hordes infringe on the experience of others. Behind these camps was a long wall of boulders in varying sizes that extended three-quarters of a mile in either direction. At one time a lodge had been built on the flat in front of the rocky slope but that had been years before. Nothing remained of it now but a leveled area. He looked away, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket-a startling pink and yellow plaid-and wiped his face, giving her a moment to recover her manners.

  "Oh," she said, feeling stupid and oddly let down.

  He kindly chose to overlook her previous hostility. "How was the big meeting?" he asked, the smile back, if not quite so genuine as before.

  "What meeting?" She felt as if she'd walked in after the movie had begun and had missed a key scene.

  "With the brass? Yesterday? How many fingers am I holding up?" he teased her with a standard question asked of people who'd suffered a break with reality for one reason or another.

  "I had no meeting yesterday," she said slowly, trying to piece together this joking, smiling man with the crestfallen, groveling-or evasive-

  subordinate she'd been expecting after being stood up with such uncomfortable consequences.

  Bleeker stared at her, blinked twice, then a comprehension of some kind animated the muscles of his face. "Shoot," he said. "Robert Prof fit."

  "We better talk about this back at the cabin."

  There was no way in hell three rangers, one in uniform, were going to have an uninterrupted discussion in full view of the visiting public.

  Inside the cabin, the door closed to discourage campers and hikers from dropping by to borrow a cup of sugar or conversation, Raymond made tea. Bleeker was six-foot or six-one and about one hundred seventy pounds, but he had a quiet, self-effacing way that made him seem a

  smaller man. With his light-toned voice-not high-pitched exactly but the sort of voice that could belong either to a man or a woman-his ratty gray cardigan and absurd handkerchief, there was something endearing dbout him. One wanted to trust him and Anna found herself nodding agreeably as he told his story.

  At a little before one o'clock, as he was hiking up the trail to the ren-dezvous with her for their hike to Gabletop Mountain, he met with Robert Proffit. Proffit, he said, was sitting in the shade of a pine tree beside the trail, waiting for him.

  Proffit told him he'd met Ranger Pigeon earlier and she'd asked that he give Ray a message. She'd tried to radio but couldn't get a signal. She'd been called back down to headquarters for an emergency meeting regard-ing deployment of rangers to the wildfires in southern California.

  "Radios are fairly worthless in a lot of the park," Ray said. Rita seconded the opinion with an unladylike snort. "I figured you'd given up and thought if I didn't get the message I'd get hold of you later from the base radio here in the cabin and we'd get ourselves straight."

  Anna sipped her tea. It was excellent, neither too strong nor too weak and a good brand, English or Irish. Bleeker's story held together and made sense. A few anomalies stood out, but Anna didn't know if they mattered or were the usual vagaries of human conduct. She looked up at her com-panions. Ray rested easily, legs crossed, wrists on his knee. Some tension showed around his eyes and mouth aging him beyond his twenty-eight years. He had, after all, left his new boss staked out on a bed of manzanita for a day and a night. She might have been mistaken for shrimp cocktail on a lettuce leaf had a rogue black bear happened by. That could wreak havoc with a man's end-of-season evaluation.

  Rita wasn't faring so well. For reasons Anna was beginning to get an inkling of, if not a handle on, she was absolutely miserable and doing a bad job of disguising the fact. Color had drained from beneath her tan, giving an unbecoming grayish cast to either side of her nose. Restless plucking and tucking had managed to drag hair out of her usually neat ponytail. The strands hung down straight and greasy-looking in front of her ears.

  "Did Proffit have a pack with him when he waylaid you?" Anna asked Ray.

  "Not that I saw. He could've had it stashed nearby I guess. He had his water bottle. I remember that."

  "Did he hike out with you?"

  "No. He said it was his last day in the park and he was going to enjoy it right there under that tree. His 'last resting place' he called it." Raymond laughed. Anna looked at him quizzically having missed the joke. "Guess you had to have been there," Ray said.

  "That fits with the note he left me," Rita put in. "It sounds like he's decided to leave the area. I can't say as I blame him." This last had a bitter edge to it and Anna shot the young woman a hard look. Ray didn't know about the blood from the backpack. Anna had decided to keep that bit of grisly information under wraps till she'd had a chance to talk with Lorraine about it. Put with the other half-truths, retracted accusations, means and opportunity, it would be enough to get an arrest warrant. If nothing else, they had him on reckless endangerment and leaving the scene of an accident, if not attempted murder and assaulting a federal.aw enforcement officer.

  Rita did know. Anna wondered why she didn't seem to hold it against Proffit. Was she in love with him? He was seven or eight years younger rhan she was but that meant little. Proffit was handsome in a wild boyish way and had an undeniable charm. Anna hadn't bee
n the least surprised that he was such a hit with the teenybopper set. He possessed that in-effable magic that makes whatever one does seem cool. When Anna was in high school a boy named Steve Stricker had had it. She and her friend Paul used to sit around trying to figure out why when Steve did it- whatever it was-it was cool and when they did it it was just stupid.

  Maybe the adolescent panache appealed to Rita. Maybe the intense passion with which Proffit approached life. Maybe it was the shared God and the seductive frenzy of praying together.

  Anna turned her attention back to their host. "Why did you believe him?" she asked Ray. "The mice. The live trap. The girls. I'd think twice before taking Proffit's word for anything."

  Raymond thought about her question, giving it due consideration. As he gathered his thoughts, she had a few of her own. Because she'd been immersed in it up to her eyeballs, it felt as if the saga of Robert Proffit's on-again, off-again status as a suspect was headline news and had been for months. In reality, all that had transpired had happened in the last four or five days. Most of it wasn't common knowledge. Raymond would not know Beth and Alexis had said Candace stayed with Robert, then recanted. He wouldn't know about the strange visitation Heath Jarrod had endured. Seen in this light, Ray's taking the word of a man he'd come to know well, a man who'd worked hand-in-glove with the rangers during a long and heartbreaking search, didn't strike her as odd as it had a minute before.